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Since everyone else seems to have their ideas, I figured I'd share mine. The key is to follow a mantra that hitters have been using for ages: "Don't try to do too much."
Don't swing for the fences, Bud. You can't have a perfect event that is going to be embraced by everyone in China, South Africa and the U.S. Do the best you can with what you've got, and you'd be surprised how good it can be.
So, here goes ...
1. Get rid of all of those "other" countries. Yeah, sure, it's all fine and dandy to say you want to grow the sport's interest in the Netherlands and China and Italy, but c'mon. Seriously. If you really must, Bud, I'm willing to have a little play-in tourney, which you could have in March, to determine one country join the field of real baseball-playing nations.
2. Those nations are: the U.S.,
3. OK, here's where I'm getting a little radical. Forget the whole idea of double-elimination or round-robin or multi-layered rounds. None of those are the way baseball playoffs are meant to be played. As long as it's already a less-than-optimal structure, might as well go with the quickest and simplest of the less-than-optimal: single elimination. You want drama? That's drama. Was anything a bigger waste of time than those "seeding games" where both teams had already made the next round?4. Do it in July, after the All-Star Game. Depending where the All-Star Game is that year, the WBC would be either on the West Coast or East Coast. You'd use four ballparks within close proximity, in California or in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor. There would be an off day on Wednesday following the All-Star Game. Play two first-round games on Thursday, two on Friday. The semifinals on Saturday. The final on Sunday. (Yeah, it would be a slight advantage for the teams that had the extra off day after the first round, but it would be marginal because you'd need three different starters for the three games either way.)
That's it. Quick. Easy. Entertaining.
Yeah, there would be grumbling about teams missing out on a home weekend series if baseball were shut down that weekend, but MLB would just give an extra piece of the TV revenue from the WBC to the teams that ended up with one less home weekend.
See, perfect.
Now that I've solved this problem, I'll get to work on fixing the economy.
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